Softbank's $98 billion venture fund is a rampaging gorilla

The Japanese multinational SoftBank Group launched its $98 billion VisionFund last year. Since then, it's dramatically changed the landscape in tech and venture capital. The fund has taken a majority stake in Uber, poured billions into WeWork, Nvidia, DoorDash, Slack and the dog walking startup Wag. SoftBank's influence is so big, it's pushing other venture capital companies to raise more money. Sequoia Capital, one of Silicon Valley's best-known firms, is reportedly trying to raise more than $12 billion in new capital just to keep up. Marketplace Tech host Molly Wood speaks to Anand Sanwal of CB Insights about how VisionFund is changing everything.
[ Marketplace ]

Masa Son Is Cashing Out. But He Forgot Something

Masayoshi Son is finally doing some spring cleaning, however there's a dusty corner he seems to be forgetting about. It's no secret the founder of SoftBank Group Corp. is a big spender. But the more he buys, the wider his so-called conglomerate discount becomes. Right now, SoftBank's 29 percent stake in Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. is worth more than 80 percent of the Japanese firm's market cap. According to sell-side
analysts, SoftBank is trading at a 46 percent discount to its fair value. [ Bloomberg ]

I’m a Cofounder of Gusto, Here’s the Advice I Give Every Startup Founder

When we graduated from Y Combinator in the winter of 2012, we had a pretty limited payroll product and a handful of early local customers. Today, we’re proud to serve more than 60,000 passionate small businesses across the country with modern payroll, benefits, and HR.

Last week, I drove down to Mountain View to meet the new YC Winter ’18 batch and share some seed-stage lessons we learned as we grew. I’d love to share these here and hope they’ll be helpful for other entrepreneurs as well. [ YC Blog ]

VC Fund Wants to Create an ‘Airbnb Mafia,’ With a Little Help From Airbnb

There were some obvious risks to the announcement from Airbnb Inc. CEO Brian Chesky, back in February, that his company won’t go public in 2018. Tech workers are a notoriously restless bunch, and by further postponing an initial public offering, Chesky took a chance that his most talented employees could defect during Airbnb’s home stretch as a private company. [ Bloomberg ]

In April 2004, a couple of Harvard undergraduate roommates took a walk in the pouring rain around the university campus. They were two of the three co-founders of an internet company that had launched a couple of months earlier — a social network start-up that we now know as Facebook. [ Tech Crunch ]

The YC Seed Deck Template

Demo Day for our Winter 2018 batch is a week from today. We’re largely focused on preparing companies for their on-stage presentations, but are also working with them on slightly longer decks to use in follow-up conversations with investors.

I’ve written about pitching before, and realized that what we were missing was a clear template for how founders should lay out their stories through slides. The deck below is a template for how I think companies should build seed
decks. While the main target for this template is a company raising its seed round, the deck is not all that different from best practices for a Series A deck – which we’ll release next. [ YC ]

Is Geographic Dispersion Of Seed Dollars Really Happening?

In the US, the median seed round has nearly quadrupled over the past seven years. In the mean time, seed investment has grown more than 7x and then fallen to a bit more than half of the high. As the market has grown and retrenched during that time period, I’ve been wondering about the geographic diversity of these seed dollars. Throughout these cycles, are startups in other states benefitting? Are they increasing their share of investment dollars? The chart above shows the share of seed investment dollars by state over the last 7 years. California remains the leader with about 40-50% of dollars over time. New York oscillates between 10% and 20%. Illinois has seen some growth,
like Texas. But on the whole, dollars haven’t changed geographies. [ TOMASZ TUNGUZ ]

Per SEC Filings, WeWork Has Raised Over $400 Million To Buy Its Own Properties

Chinese bike-sharing startup Ofo raises $866M in new financing led by Alibaba Group

Why these 6 Twitter powerhouses want diversity of company ownership made public